Good afternoon and good morning wherever you are in the Art World!

The Art Talk is delighted to welcome you all on another inspiring Art talk from Lugano, Switzerland. Paolo Repetto is inviting us to the Repetto Gallery’s inauguration of its new headquarters in Lugano, with “Kenosis”exhibition, dedicated to two of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century.

Kenosis means emptying, kenós (empty): such as renunciation, reduction, transparency, central terms to indicate the heart of their poetica. Lucio Fontana (Rosario di Santa Fè, Argentina, 1899 - Comabbio, Varese, 1968). Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 - Milan, 1986). A confrontation, a dialogue, between two great artists who were also friends; an elective affinity: in freeing art from matter: in making it increasingly essential and lyrical and luminous. In breaking ‘our casing, our physical bark’.

In Fontana, in its splendid Space Environments and in its famous cuts and holes, starting in the late 1940s, a radical, clear, clean essentiality, in deep and minimal gestures that have married Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's favourite motto: Less is more: the less is the most. A happy, elegant reduction to conquer more space and higher light. In the very lucid words of Melotti, “The ‘cutting’ of Fontana is thelematic need to get out of the informal jungle“.

In Melotti, the same reduction and grace and transparency, in a less vertical but more horizontal declination: the ideal horizontality of the ancient frieze, freely taken up in its varied and new metopes of the tale, of the narrative, of the archaic and classic myth.

About fifty works will be on display, in an intense and cheerful dialogue, to testify to their ‘new Renaissance’. Different works, which document their varied paths: from a baroque ceramic by Fontana, Donna in the mirror, from 1948, to one of the most emblematic “sculptures” of Melotti, in brass and painted fabric: The exit of the Valkyries, from 1980, where his great love for music crystallises in an aerial and symbolic image, fragile and solemn. From the numerous Space Concepts, central to Fontana's poetics, on paper and other materials: on canvas there will be two masterpieces: a three red cuts from 1962, 65x50 cm., and a rare cut on gold-coloured painted canvas, 1960, 70x60 cm., where his concept of Waiting, of a two-dimensional surface that, opening up, becomes three- Spaces and forms, domestic and intimate nebulous galaxies, now baroque - as restless lines of research and movement - now essential and archaic, even in the numerous ceramics, painted chalks and mixed-technical papers by Melotti.